The past few days I have finally had some time off from work and went back to hacking away at my 2D stuff here at home. Here is the current state of things.

The game I am going to make: A post-apocalyptic-ish shoot em up. After making the brief Fantasm Fortress a few months ago as an excercise in 24 hour development, I really got the itch to do a shmup right. That is, FF was about 30 seconds worth of fun, and the code behind that 30 seconds was so inflexible and single-minded, it could not be easily extended or even modified for that matter.

I actually intend to make this one a full game (as much as 3-5 levels can be considered a full game), so I want to do things right from the beginning.

Also, this is a great opportunity for me to blind all who see this with my astonishing art skills. The blob of pixels that I can put forth onto a digital image are the very spawn of Medusa's hair. Ugliness aside, creating shitty pixel art is actually kind of therapeutic for me. Weird, eh?

A sampler or two:



So there you can see my first attempts at a soldier, and some environment destructibles. The sad thing is, as bad as these are, I actually took a lot of time to do them, so I can only imagine how things will look later when I don't spend any time on them...

Unfortunately I don't have much to show screenshot-wise at the moment, but hopefully I can manage some screens by the end of the week. The last day or so I have spent a lot of time [re]working my texture/model managers. My custom animation data files are so horrid, that I thought I'd share an example with you. Yep, I am still using .ini files with this particular version of my framework. I have some Xml stuff scattered here and there, but converting the code necessary seems like a huge [and somewhat unnecessary] pain. So it goes.

The soldier animation file:


...and the accompanying Soldier Texture file. What a hoot.


Now if only I had a tool to generate those damn files for me...